Israeli settlers attack Palestinian mosques

Mel Frykberg, The Electronic Intifada, 11 May 2010



A Palestinian man reacts to the scene in Lubban al-Sharqiya's local mosque after settlers carried out an arson attack. (Rami Swidan/MaanImages)






LUBBAN AL-SHARQIYA, occupied West Bank (IPS) - "There is immense anger as well as a feeling of vulnerability and fear when a place of sanctuary and holiness is subject to indiscriminate violence," says Issa Hussein.

"Despite living under a brutal military occupation and being subjected to regular attacks by Israeli settlers for decades, normally places of worship were spared," Hussein, a spokesman from this Palestinian village, near Nablus, in the northern West Bank, told IPS.

"People could forget about the economic hardship, the political oppression and their personal problems for a few hours a week as they retreated to pray in the mosque."

All this changed dramatically for the agricultural village of 3,000 residents a few weeks ago.

Israeli settlers from one of the three surrounding illegal settlements, which have been built on land belonging to Lubban al-Shariqiya and other Palestinian villages, carried out an arson attack on the local mosque.

The Israeli Civil Administration, which administers the occupied West Bank, originally denied that Israeli settlers had been involved, and instead blamed an electrical short-circuit.

However, Israeli fire-fighters who later came to investigate the gutted mosque said arson was the likely cause and ruled out the possibility of an electrical fire.

"The part of the mosque where the fire broke out was undergoing renovations and the electricity had been turned off," explained Hussein.

"Furthermore, some villagers heard cars drawing up at about 3am in the morning of the attack and saw settlers getting out of the vehicles and going into the mosque," said Hussein as he took IPS on a tour of the charred and gutted mosque.

Curtains from windows had been torn down to help the fire burn. Qurans, which are usually piled up at one end of the mosque, had been moved to the other end and placed in piles next to the bathroom.

On top of, and adjacent to, the pile of Qurans were shoes which had all been arranged into a Star of David sign, Judaism's chief emblem.

The vandalism of deliberately attacking a holy place in a deeply religious society, combined with the use of provocative and offensive symbolism, was not lost on the villagers.

"We would never store the Qurans near a toilet or put shoes anywhere near our holy books. Everybody is forced to take their shoes off at the door before they even enter the mosque," Hussein told IPS.

This attack is just the latest in a string of attacks on Palestinians and their property, including mosques, as Israeli settlers up their "price-tag policy."

The settlers have warned that for every illegal settlement outpost dismantled, restraining order issued or settler arrested in the West Bank, they will carry out retaliatory attacks against Palestinians, their homes, places of business, motor cars, agricultural fields, livestock and mosques.

Not a weekend goes by without Palestinians being assaulted, olive trees cut down or uprooted, fields set alight and cars stoned or burnt.

In December, a mosque in the nearby village of Yasuf was gutted and burnt. In April, Star of David and racist anti-Arab slogans were spray painted on a mosque in the village of Huwarra. Several cars were also set alight.

In turn settlers driving near Palestinian villages have also been subjected to stone-throwing and periodic attacks with Molotov cocktails by Palestinians, damaging vehicles and in some instances causing injuries.

However, Israeli military investigators believe the attacks on mosques are part of a deliberate policy by settlers and have uncovered information about future settler plans to attack mosques.

A number of settlers were arrested by Israel's domestic intelligence agency, the Shin Bet's Jewish department, but these arrests preceded more attacks on Palestinians. As of now it is not certain whether any charges will be pressed against those arrested.

The UN Special Coordinator for the Middle East Peace Process, Robert Serry, condemned the settler attacks.

"I condemn these attacks. It is vital that the Israeli government impose the rule of law and that those responsible for such crimes are brought to justice," said Serry.

The special coordinator's statement also expressed concern over "a number of attacks upon mosques in recent months, as well as violence against Palestinian property and individuals by extremist settlers."

"This is not the first time we have been subjected to settler attacks. They have burnt our crops on a regular basis. They also machine-gunned to death an elderly man and woman in 1990 near out village after Meir Kahane was assassinated in New York," Hussein told IPS.

Meir Kahane was the founder of the Jewish Defense League as well as the ultra right-wing and fascist Kach party which espouses the expulsion of Palestinians from Israel and the Occupied Palestinian Territories.

It was outlawed by the Israeli Knesset or parliament for being racist but it continues to attract supporters in Israel.

Members of the Palestinian Authority (PA) visited Lubban al-Sharqiya the same day that IPS was there and promised that the mosque would be rebuilt as soon as possible.

PA President Mahmoud Abbas, whose term expired last January and has been in power under contested emergency powers, has personally ordered its reconstruction.

Will Obama adopt a dangerously simplistic peace plan?

Ali Abunimah, The Electronic Intifada, 3 May 2010



A peace plan brought to the Obama Administration is hardly a "bold gesture." (Pete Souza/White House)






A new conventional wisdom is rapidly taking shape that the United States can resolve the 130-year-old conflict in Palestine by advancing its own peace plan. Former US National Security Advisor Zbigniew Brzezinski and former US Congressman Stephen Solarz outlined such a plan in The Washington Post recently, and argued that President Obama could boost its prospects with a "bold gesture" -- a trip, to Jerusalem and Ramallah in the company of Arab and other leaders to unveil it ("To achieve Mideast peace, Obama must make a bold Mideast trip," 11 April 2010).

Strong supporters of Israel have pushed back that "imposing peace" would not work, but few Palestinian voices have been heard. Indeed, from a Palestinian perspective, this idea is dangerously simplistic, and more likely to deepen festering injustices and fuel, rather than resolve conflict.

The "comprehensive solution" Brzezinski and Solarz propose is nothing of the kind because the conflict cannot be reduced to a mere border dispute between Israel and a putative Palestinian state. They propose for example "a territorial settlement based on the 1967 borders, with mutual and equal adjustments to allow the incorporation of the largest West Bank settlements into Israel."

This is deceptive; the West Bank and Gaza Strip constitute just 22 percent of historic Palestine between the Jordan River and Mediterranean Sea, in which Palestinians formed the overwhelming majority prior to their expulsion and flight as Israel was created in 1948. Official Palestinian acceptance of the two-state solution was a concession unprecedented in the history of any nation because it involved surrendering the 78 percent of the country on which Israel was established. To demand that Palestinians further divide the remainder represents no compromise by Israel. It merely ratifies Israel's systematic colonization of West Bank land since 1967 in flagrant defiance of international law.

The proposed "land swap" to compensate Palestinians for annexed Israeli settlements is illusory. The majority of the half million Israeli settlers are concentrated in and around Jerusalem -- the heart of the would-be Palestinian state. Yet the lands that Israel might consider handing over in compensation are small barren tracts far away from population centers. If there are such lands that could compensate the French for Paris, the British for London or Americans for New York City, then there might be lands that Palestinians could accept instead of Jerusalem.

Even more devastating to Palestinian rights, Brzezinski and Solarz float "a solution to the refugee problem involving compensation and resettlement in the Palestinian state but not in Israel." This they call "a bitter pill" but argue that "Israel cannot be expected to commit political suicide for the sake of peace."

Palestinian refugees have an internationally-recognized legal right to return to their homes and lands, but Israel has always denied this on the sole grounds that Palestinians are not Jews. Thus Gaza, where 80 percent of the population are refugees, is essentially a holding pen for humans of the "wrong" ethno-religious group. Would Brzezinski and Solarz be so sanguine about accommodating Israel's discriminatory character if its grounds for refusing the return of refugees was that they had the "wrong" skin color?

I write from downtown Pretoria, once the all-white capital of the South African apartheid state, which also argued that ending white rule would be "political suicide." The notion that people of different groups cannot or should not mix is belied by the vibrant multiracial reality in the streets of Pretoria outside my window today.

And precedents for the actual return of refugees abound. Under the US-brokered 1995 Dayton Agreement that ended the Bosnia war, almost half a million refugees and internally displaced persons returned home with international assistance, to areas that had become dominated demographically and politically by members of another ethno-national community -- an enormous achievement in a country with a total population of 3.5 million and deep traumas as a result of recent war.

Other than Israel's discriminatory aversion to non-Jews it is difficult to see why Palestinian refugees could not also return to their lands inside Israel, the vast majority of which remain uninhabited.

By endorsing Israel's self-definition as a "Jewish state," Brzezinski and Solarz not only ratify the violation of the fundamental rights of refugees, but consign another 1.4 million Palestinian citizens of Israel to permanent second-class status within an increasingly intolerant and ultranationalist Israel. A more likely outcome than "two states living side by side in peace" is that Palestinian citizens of Israel will come under increasing threat of expulsion to the Palestinian state -- in other words, a new round of ethnic cleansing.

The vision of a truncated, demilitarized mini-state in no way fulfills basic Palestinian aspirations and rights and would bring no more peace or dignity than the bantustans which apartheid South Africa tried to establish for its black citizens to forestall and delay demands for equality and democracy. Nor would a trip by Obama do anything to revive shop-worn ideas that have gained little real support either among Palestinians or Israelis since they were first proposed at the failed Camp David summit in 2000.

Margaret Thatcher once said that partitioning South Africa to create separate black and white states would be like "trying to unscramble an egg," and could lead to tremendous bloodshed. It is time to recognize that this truth also applies to Palestine/Israel and to seek political solutions similar to the one here, or the settlement in Northern Ireland, that embrace rather than attempt to deny diversity, equality and justice for all who live in that land.

Ali Abunimah is co-founder of The Electronic Intifada and author of One Country: A Bold Proposal to End the Israeli-Palestinian Impasse. This article was originally published by The Hill and is republished with the author's permission.